I was bored in my first class this morning and after reading a few blogs about why people prefer books to other media, I thought I'd make up my own list. This is what I came up with:1. Books have infinite battery life.2. Your page always loads -- and is faster than broadband!3. It will survive drops that would shatter most laptops and tablets.4. Books are available in many sizes, editions, colors, genres, etc.5. You can read your page in direct sunlight.6. Nobody tells you "turn that book down!"7. VERY realistic special effects.8. Save points anywhere.9. Never have to replay the same thing over and over (unless you want to).10. You can travel anywhere from anywhere.11. Giant picture -- not limited by screen size.12. The older it is, the more smell-o-vision it has.13. If it breaks anyone can fix it or it's affordable to replace.14. Don't need any special hardware/no compatibility issues.15. Reading is healthy for you.16. Books don't malfunction.17. It was the first portable!18. No advertisements to interrupt the plot.19. Make characters look how you want (somewhat).20. If you're sequestered as a juror, you can read but maybe not watch TV.

Ok so granted some of these are just silly, but seriously...books are amazing! I think the biggest think people don't like about them is that they take a lot longer (in most cases) to finish than a TV show or even a movie. People are all about speed nowadays and maybe they don't see reading as very speedy. However, it's nice to unwind to something that isn't done in a half hour or two hours, to take your time with it. Movies cost $15-$30 new and you get 2 hours of entertainment. Books on the other hand usually can cost under $10 or maybe $20 for a nice edition and they last you days, weeks, maybe even months if you really take your time with it. I will agree sometimes a long book is intimidating and you don't think you have the time to invest in it. I have the answer to that though that I've been researching as of late and want to share: SPEED READING. Many think of it only for school or textbooks but the proper speed reading methods actually make recreational reading more enjoyable. Normal reading you see text and picture it in your head. Your eyes slowly go across the page. Speed reading sees texts in chunks, using your peripheral vision as well so you read multiple words at once instead of one at a time. It works like this: You take a line of text and divide it into two equal halves:

Jim loved playing golf, he'd*play all day if he could. The * is the division point. Then you look in the middle of the lines, so for the first half you'd focus around the word PLAYING and the second half you'd be around DAY. Then your peripheral vision picks up the rest of the line. You essentially move your eyes twice, not across the whole line. What that does is suppresses sub-vocalization of the words which slows you down. It also is less strain on your eyes so you can read longer. You get just as much out of it too. Slowly, you move closer to the middle of the line until eventually, you can read each line with one look, it would be HE'D in this case. Then it's just reading vertically down -- but that takes mastering and I'm not there yet myself. But so far this seems to be a great way to read, has increased my speed almost by double and I'm enjoying it more because I'm taking in chunks, not words and I can actually see the picture more vividly in my head because of that. One exercise you can do is take your finger (or a pen) and run it along the text spending about 1 SECOND on each line -- just whip it across like you used to do in 1st grade when learning to read, but go quickly and make your eyes keep up. You'll find you're still reading at that speed because your eyes can recognize a word even faster than that! It's the sub-vocalization, the thinking of each word independently and then moving on that slows us down -- that's not needed at a higher reading level anymore. This is a good exercise to practice reading quicker, then move on to the first one I listed if that wasn't working well for you, right off. Speed reading is an amazing thing and actually gives me hope I can catch up on all the novels I want to read as well as keep ahead in my school work. It's a skill I think should be taught in high school because it is immensely helpful. If you don't like reading or wish you could read faster, try these tips out and you'll be speeding through books in no time. It's just like movies and TV and the story is MUCH better (read my 20 reasons again if you don't believe me)! I watched probably about 50 videos on YouTube on this subject but even though I have an issue with his username, this guy’s video hits all the points pretty well. It illustrates what I wrote above so if you need some help figuring out what I said to do, watch the video below. Happy reading!